after the boredom of probing, the nonsense of turret sections, i miss the mako, it broke up combat, and it did it well, it was fun, and more importantly funny, mako is an example of things we miss from bioware, well intentioned sections, with dodgey mechanics and some minor plot flaws.

maby with DA3 and ME4 we’ll get bioware back. we can hope, we can dream!

Yeah, I liked it too, but I didn’t like the learning curve. In fact, come to think of it, I don’t think I started really enjoying the Mako until the second or third play-through, which was how long it took to get the hang of that horrible handling. I don’t know what to make of that, then, overall. Does something count as good if it is only good after 60 hours of practice? I played it on the 360; I wonder if that makes a difference. Shamus seemed to think it made it worse. I guess it shows how good the other stuff was in that game, that I played it enough to become competent enough on the Mako that that thing became fun.

Ironically, while playing the PC version I always wondered if the vehicle sections would be better with a gamepad and wrote it off as being a section that wasn’t ported over well from the 360, but I guess it was just wonky all around.

Shame it all got axed in the sequels, though. Planetary exploration in ME1 was kind of boring (okay, maybe really boring), but the foundation was there for something that could have been interesting at the very least, and it gave the universe a sense of scale that I found was sorely lacking in the sequels. As it is, it feels like the smallest galaxy in the world.

When there isn’t a bottomless pit or a lava pool around forcing you to be careful and making the Mako’s semi weightlessness annoying, it’s a really enjoyable, ultimate off-roading sort of vehicle. My favorite bit was going up near vertical mountainsides and ramping off the top. After seeing the other games, being able to explore worlds non-linearly is also pretty refreshing when you’re actually playing, though I got a bit annoyed at the multiple planets with those monkey things and the exact same mossy landscape texture.

I actually liked ME2… Mostly because I had faith the writers could fit it into the 3rd game properly, and because mostly because everything that wasn’t the main plot was really really good. Plus I liked the idea of the suicide mission.

You know? I actually preferred the probing to the Mako. Yeah, it was just a mindless skinner box, but that made it a lot more engaging than the infuriatingly bad Mako sections of the game.

No, really, this section is actually painful for me to watch, for reminding me just how. Fucking. ANNOYING the god damn thing is to drive. Like, how fucking hard can it be to make something that you can DRIVE IN A STRAIGHT LINE.

All Bioware had to do was fix their terrain generator to produce smoothed hills, create a few more rooms for the prefab bases and give Mako some extra weight. Removing the exploration missions completely, at least for me, ruined the sense of scale. Not a good result when you have space as your setting.

Yeah, I remember being excited about this before ME2 came out, when they were talking about how they tried to make each “exploration” location in ME2 a unique and exciting environment that would really make the galaxy feel like a diverse place. Then, it turned out to be just the “anomaly detected” stuff, which took all the feeling of exploration out of the game. Very disappointing. They could have just fixed the Mako sandboxes, if that was the problem. Make them look unique. Easier to navigate. Something. Additional dungeons on random planets is not exploration.

When I first heard about the Reapers Attacking thing I was actually optimistic, I was thinking “That’s awesome! We probe, the Reapers attack and we engage in some space combat with the Normandy. You can try to run or try to fight and you actually get to properly pilot for once!”

Then I found out it’s just a matter of cheesing the sector borders and hitting a Reaper is an instant game over. gg Bioware :<

Actually it’s a matter of running around the system pinging like crazy to see where everything is, then letting the Reapers catch you.
Then you hit Resume and it loads the autosave that the game makes whenever you enter a system, and then you go get all the stuff in the system now that you already know where they are.

That is a cool payoff for a puzzle but I can’t remember if there’s another like it in the Mass Effect series. The closest thing I can think of is turning the mech against the Eclipse in Garrus’ recruitment mission in 2. And that was a worse puzzle and worse payoff.

I think it gives you your full loadout of grenades here. If you’ve bought the upgrades, you can have 8-9, which is easily enough, even without melee.

The Mako really just needed to have the gravity turned up. It was fairly controllable on the console, just…prone to flight. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone modded it to be better. Now if only Bioware had done that.

There’s also a box containing a few grenades, so even without upgrades it is possible to get everyone if you’re careful. Also melee knocks them out rather than killing them, although the game never explains this.

In the twenty or so times I reloaded that section, I NEVER figured that out. Was there an in game tip that I missed mentioning that? I just assumed it would be lethal because that’s how it works every where else in the game.

Imagine: you land on a either an arid or junkyard planet and go through several corridors with chest high walls and mooks. Then you are introduced to a SUPEREPICBADASSBROFISTBRO set piece. After killing more dudes you are then presented with a 6 minute long cut scene which tells you that you now have 4d20 more war assets and 5d10 more gol….credits. Oh, and there is a piano too. Then back on the Normandy Hackett pats you on the back and tells you that mowing down those cerberus/geth/husk/robot/orc mooks went really far in stopping the Reapers and taking back Earth!

Edit: Oh, and Hacketts adds that “killing civilians”, “impaling dudes on dragon’s teeth”, “being a space zombie”, “rebelling against their creators” or “being generic bad guys” is their usual M.O.

….and then after all this your game crashes due to a ninja windows update restart.

I’m not sure exploration would have made much sense in ME3 anyway (if it ever did in ME1) when you’re supposed to be on a time-sensitive mission to stop the end of the galaxy, which is happening RIGHT NOW. Not a great time to take a minute for stellar cartography.

I did like it in the first game, though. Really added to the sense of scale. So did many other details, for that matter, like the airlock sequences when exiting the Normandy, and even the excruciatingly long elevator rides. A lot of those things were gone in the sequels, so even with much more content, they felt smaller to me.

They could’ve given you areas to search for survivors, for example when you are asked to go to the Elcor homeworld they could’ve given you an open area to explore for groups of survivors that you can’t quite lock on to with the scanners or something. They could’ve worked it in.

I always preferred cold abilities to fire ones,in all the games.Slowing down your enemies,sometimes even halting them completely,whats not to like?Although,fire in me2 was really good,because it made them panic and jump around.

And lots of people carried things that exploded when hit by fire. Plus the ubiquitous red barrels. And DoT is always fun. Also fire works against armor of which there was quite a bit. I could enjoy fire right from the start but cold (at least in ME2) tended to not keep pace with the level of enemies until the end. As in most of the time it had minimal to no effect.

I did like that the different ammo types correlated by effectiveness to different defenses like shields and armor. It added a layer of strategy to the gunplay, if you played a gun-heavy character, as I did. The effects could have been stronger, though, I agree.

This is the real tragedy of Mass Effect (1 and the series). There was potential. Pure awesome base, lacking polish to really bring it out. It was Bioware’s first game towards the pantheon of gaming legends, where Deus Ex, Thief and System Shock reside. It was their last.

Totally right here, but don’t forget Bioware’s earlier triumphs, like KoTOR and Jade Empire. It’s a shame how that brand has fallen. Used to love them so much. Now secretly hoping that they don’t create sequels to the games I loved, like Jade Empire, for fear of them ruining another promising franchise.

A moment of silence is in order. R.I.P. Bioware, you squandered the last of your goodwill with the most terrible ending anyone has ever seen.

Oh wow. I’d not read that before but upon looking at it…it better be a hoax. That sounds truly 12-year-old-fanfics level of awful.

Given that the Extended Ending DLC cuts out the possibility of the Terminator stuff if you take certain endings, I can only assume that either Bioware rethought their plans or it’s definitely hoax territory.

Especially since Control seems to be the ‘best’ Extended Ending out of the three. At least in my opinion.

Yeah, normally I’d chalk it up to fans (and/or trolls) being silly, but Bioware looked at the original endings to ME3 and actually allowed it to ship like that.

Let’s just say that my fate in Bioware is already quite broken.

I did hear that particular rumor before the extended cut was even announced, so changed plans would not surprise me. The “leak” happened during the height of the “artistic integrity” malarkey though, so I could sadly easily imagine it being a (hopefully) abandoned draft.

After all, The Crucible is such a fascinating character! Who wouldn’t want him driving around your Shepard as a brain-dead meat-puppet? Ugh.

I tried looking for a confirm or denial but I didn’t find a non Bioware forum source. Any links?

Honestly I’m not opposed to more being done in the universe, no pun intended. It is just that the way the original trilogy ended left me feeling so disappointed and downright angry, that I feel completely uninterested in any continuation.

If they do manage to salvage the franchise with ME4… Well I’m not holding my breath and I will frankly never preorder a Bioware title again. Once bitten, you know?

Maybe they could get Obsidian to do a dark and murky deconstruction on the entire series with exceptional characterization and atmosphere and rushed and poorly constructed ending (which still manages to be better than that of Mass Effect 3).

Ooh, yeah, Balder’s Gate, too. Forgot that was Bioware. Man, so many great games out of these guys. Come to think of it, did Bioware ever really whiff on a title prior to Dragon Age? And even that had a following. Mass Effect 2? I’m not sure if I can really pin down the exact drop off point, but it was precipitous. I guess it was the EA merger, but that’s such an easy scapegoat that I’m hesitant to buy it.

I personally consider NW2 superior in every aspect, although i never reached the end of the first one. But for some reason I’ll hazard a guess that they managed a better ending the “Rocks fall, everybody dies!”, so I”l give it that.

However! For it’s time NW1 was a stunning looking game and the cubes aside the dept and flexibility of the editing tools are still impressive. Never tried it, but from what I’ve heard there is still a thriving online community as well, not bad considering the age the game.

The story though… I wonder if there could be something in that? Bioware has always had amazing character and set-piece writing, but most of their games plot weren’t exactly Shakespeare. The Bioware formula anyone?

I had not thought of it before, but an argument could be made that Bioware have never been good at writing stories. Mass effect 3 was simply the first time the plot was so rotten to the core that the rest of the experience couldn’t save it.

Creative people really need someone to rein them in – behind every great author is a great editor. Just look at the difference between Lucas-with-reins (original trilogy) and Lucas-unleashed (prequels/special edition).

Oh, I don’t know. Sure, what you say about George Lucas is true. But what about (…almost everything except maybe the last season of) B5? JMS didn’t really have anyone to rein him in, being the executive producer of the series, and it worked really well, almost all the time.

…On the other hand, this is definitely an exception rather than a rule, and he did have something like fifteen years (IIRC) to get the story down before starting to actually create it. So probably not something we should be expecting. It is, however, a counterexample. :-)

There’s also Mike “Something Awesome” Laidlaw there and as a lead to boot. Anyway, it’s not like Jade Empire didn’t have its derpy moments, so you can imagine they’re responsibility of those hacks. >:-)

The story though… I wonder if there could be something in that? Bioware has always had amazing character and set-piece writing, but most of their games plot weren't exactly Shakespeare. The Bioware formula anyone?

First of all, BioWare aren’t playing to their strengths; making memorable, sympathetic characters. It’s possible that their plots would have been much more interesting if they were character driven.

Second, I suspect the plots had to be nailed down first, as soon as possible, leaving very little room for (wait for it) re-iteration(!) I also suspect that the character bits we all know and love were written as bonus content, were reworked and scrapped almost constantly, because hey, they’re just extra stuff, right?

But my line of reasoning is, the plot informs every other aspect of the game (well, it should ;) ) – level design , choices to make, enemy design, combat, art style, cut scenes and voice acting etc. It has to be nailed down first for those things to be built on top of it, and if it shifts too much, large portions of your assets have to be rebuild to make sense.

I do realize that no production have unlimited time and money, but where not talking about one guy in his basement and a cool idea for a pong ripoff here.

Mass effect, Bioware and EA, those are huge names and I don’t get, why did they force something like that out the door so quickly?

Considering how rare certain return on investment is in ANY medium, why not take your time and make certain that you end up with something that gets talked about for years to come, instead of laughed at… Sigh.

It seems like there is this paradigm, this prevalent idea among businessmen these days… that to be successful you have to act like locust swarms (or maybe it’s the shareholders and stock traders that act like this?) You come into a cultivated field, you squeeze it dry and move on, leaving someone else to re-cultivate this field.

The problem is, it’s non-sustainable, and only works in the long term if the locusts are the minority, which they aren’t. You can see this not only in games, but also in the fields of foresting, livestock and international trade.

Nah, it’s not the corporate structure that’s causing them to rush things out the door. They’d have the same problem if they were privately held.

Every day you spend on the game costs money. Every day the game isn’t out the door is a day that no one is paying you money for it. No company can go indefinitely without selling something. They have to make an assessment, before they take on a project, about how much they think it can sell, and they can’t spend more money or time on it than that without risking their business on the hope that they’ll produce a rare masterpiece. The more they stretch it out, the riskier it becomes, even if the product is getting better – because they were supposed to have assessed the risk/reward correctly in the first place. Companies have to keep moving to stay afloat. It means that they have to deal with deadlines, but it’s usually a less-risky way of doing business. That’s good, because it means that game developing can be a viable industry, but the downside is that corners sometimes have to be cut if developers run over their schedule or budget. Overall, I’m pretty sure the profit margins in this industry are paper-thin, even for “giants” like EA.

The only alternative is to be diversified enough that you can afford some leeway when things go slower than predicted. If you don’t happen to own Steam, you’ve got to try to capitalize on fads and trends so that your “guaranteed” annual hit can fund some cushion on the deadline for your artistic darling.

So I don’t think the Mass Effect disaster was a result of some inherent deficiency of the business model or corporate structure. Rather, I think that somebody just dropped the ball when it came time to decide if the public would like the direction the project was going. Just some stupid decisions, that’s all. It looks like Bioware just needs some different people in those roles these days.

However, this is also the case of the publishers dropping a butt-load of money into a project and requiring a huge turnover just to cover the expenses of making the game in the first place. Surely that is a factor as well?

Actually, Mass Effect 3 was delayed until March. That’s the kind of thing that strains the budget for a game, and it’s all part of the economic analysis that goes into these things beforehand: they decided that optimally, they would release during the holidays, but that they could afford to go as long as March but no farther without risking financial failure on the project (and probably hurting or killing other and future projects in the process).

With regard to the financing of the projects themselves, I’m not familiar with EA in particular, but I think most businesses operate on leverage (debt). That’s all part of the analysis that sets the deadlines going in. They “borrow” money (either via actual loans or venture capital investments or issuing bonds or more stock or whatever) based on how much they think a project will make, and then the deadlines are set based on how long they can carry that debt before they need to start making a return. They have to keep moving to stay ahead of their liabilities and show marginal profits in the long run.

Regardless, I think you’re right in that the sales from a game release probably pay for the last three years, not the next three years, which is why the deadlines and sales goals have to be so strict (the company has to discharge its debts or they will balloon). That’s my impression of how it works, anyway.

Well, what I mean is, the games I listed, not only do they have great stories to tell, they are great games in their own respect, and they interweave the two rather well.

I respect the kinds of things Bioware has done in the past, and there are large aspects of their current games that deserve admiration as well. However, in their games, story and game have been kept at a distance, and the gameplay itself has fundamental flaws(heavy reliance on dice rolls).

To this day, if I say “Deus Ex” on the Internet, someone will re-install the original game, play through it and find at least one new story bit, one stash they’ve missed, one path they didn’t take, or see the game elements interact in a way they haven’t seen before. 11 years later.

Well I take consolation in the fact that dying of heroes of might and magic has spawned king’s bounty the legend.So with the downfall of bioware,I expect the rise of some new company that will give us excellent rpgs in the near future.

I don’t know if somebody mentioned it in the original run of this episode, but Samuel L. Jackson was in the third Die Hard movie, not the second one as Shamus said in the episode. The second one (Die Hard 2: Die Harder) was in an airport and featured former Senator and Presidential candidate Fred Thompson in a memorable role. That was also the last one that was a Christmas movie (the first Die Hard is still my pick for greatest Christmas movie of all time).

In this episode, Shamus once again complains about a Mako being found in a garage. IN A GARAGE. A GARAGE. THAT’S WHERE VEHICLES ARE FOUND GRARASOFKMSA.

Yeah, the Mako doesn’t teleport; it’s not a unique model, and the garages on Noveria and Feros simply have their own Makos. (It might make more sense for them to have other models of cars for you to use (and to be fair, they do have other models, though they aren’t usable), but I can give that a pass.)

These particular garages have exactly ONE vehicle. It’s always lined right up at the door, prepped and ready for use. Like you’d called the parking lot attended 30 minutes before coming down and he’s set everything up for you.

Also, if you’re going with “these are common vehicles – everyone’s got one around somewhere,” why hasn’t anyone (ever) taken the time to customize these for optimal performance for that planet’s local terrain and gravity? Really? There’s no one why knows how to adjust the shocks? Don’t give me that “there’s a low local gravity” unless the gravity is somehow smart enough to snap back to “normal” every time you step out of the vehicle. (And even if the local gravity is less than the vehicle was originally built for, why isn’t there anyone with enough physics knowledge to rig a few heavy stones up to the back end to hold the thing down better?)

Yeah, all the Mako criticism that goes beyond “Oh, they decided to build in a vehicle section” is a little nitpicky. But given the amount of care that went in to a lot of Mass Effect’s world building, having the exact same vehicle on every planet, and every location having EXACTLY one, and every location having it prepped, ready, and pointed towards the door YOU need feels sloppy. Mass Effect put a lot of effort into this sort of thing, so they get graded on a harder curve.

“In this comment, you complain about my complaint, and then you go on to RECOGNIZE THE VERY REASON FOR THE COMPLAINT ADSDSADSKJASDKJ!”

If I didn’t do that, how could I leave an opening for you to complain about my complaining about your complaint?

“So, the garages in these places just have tanks sitting around where anyone can hop in and start blasting stuff?”
Of course! You mean you *don’t* want a future where you can play bumper-cars-with-cannons?

But anyway, I wasn’t saying that ‘military-grade vehicles for everyone!’ wasn’t silly (because it is, and becomes even sillier when everyone has the exact same vehicle models), but that the ‘teleporting Mako’ meme is (e.g. see the video description). (Although I don’t know who writes those. Maybe Josh did this one.)

Cerberus would like to thank you for your public support and send you a gift of gratitude — a collectible thresher maw plush. It’s cute, cuddly, and squirts sulfuric acid when you hug it. How adorable.

In defense of the complaint, having Joker radio over to say “Now that we have access to the garage, we’ve had someone move the Mako there for you to use” would have solved the problem. I’ts not unreasonable to think that vehicles get there after being offloaded from the spaceship that brought them, and that there’s a special service entrance for them to get in and out of spaceships docked at the site that’s different from the personnel entrance you arrive through.

This applies to Noveria, not so much to Feros though. Then again, it’s just a matter of having someone explaining things. As it stands, you only know you need to use the Mako because you found it there, with no communication with anyone beforehand explaining that it would be necessary.

Let’s not even get started on that. You shoot out *glass* transparent aluminum <_< supports. Glass supports which have retractable metal shielding. Just… just what.

And because I’m a materials scientist, I ought make clear that by ‘glass’ I’m talking about something that appears to have similar properties to silica glass, and not simply making a comment on non-crystalline atomic structures.

it would have been much better if old non-heatsink weapons were still around then you can actually see that they possibly were a lot weaker. It would at least give a good excuse for getting rid of such a seemingly superior weapon.
That said, I’m pretty sure if you just added more and more barrels to your infinite ammo machine gun the power level would even out eventually, and because of technological advances the weapons could be small enough and light enough to still be man portable.try comparing a single blue Suns Merc with a crappy 30 round assault rifle against a volus with seven infinite ammo miniguns strapped together.

They let you play as an elcor? since when? I played two nights ago and there were no elcor. I think you mean volus, which exist primarily as a joke class. I actually like some of the justifications for it (they have very low health, so they rely purely on shields for protection, the bio states they need what amounts to power armor ro fight, and they have no melee), although it still makes little sense. Although I for one hope to see Elcor in the future.

Ah, but you see if they kept the old guns in game then it’d be harder for them to recycle the models/designs from the guns in ME1 for guns in ME2/ME3 without that same disconnect occurring. They’d have to come up with even more new models for guns.

The worst part of thermal clip design, in my opinion was the source: Geth tech. In ME1 you can actually get Geth Pulse Rifles as an AR weapon and of course they use the same cooldown mechanic as all the other guns. If the Geth Pulse Rifles used the Thermal Clip design in ME1 and been noticeably more effective for it, it would’ve gone a long way to making them more palpable in ME2/3.

I don’t even remember geth weapons being that strong, it seems kind of unlikely that they’d be the next big influence for the next generation of firearms. considering that the geth still use 300-year-old sniper rifles According to Legion, that would make the quarians the most advanced weapons manufacturers in the galaxy and they can’t even fight a cold.

The geth weapons, like all other weapons in ME1, were inferior to the Spectre gear. The Spectre Gear which you never see again after ME1 which is a walking plothole in and of itself (lampshaded slightly by Mordin in ME2 but as others have pointed out – merely pointing out your bad design doesn’t stop it from being bad design, it merely shows that you’re aware of it).

Those aren’t Spectre weapons, they’re just expensive weapons. The Pistol is a Carnifex variant designed by law enforcement for undercover agents, the Shotgun is popular among slavers/pirates and is banned in Citadel space (but I guess you can get it ‘cos…you know, Spectre) and the Sniper Rifle was an Alliance-made mod of the original Widow rifle.

No ‘official’ Spectre gear like in ME1, just stuff you get from the Spectre shop which I guess can source some of the rarer stuff.

Oh, I see what you’re saying. Yeah, the original Spectre Gear was great. I don’t really understand why the Spectres, who are supposed to be independently operating spy-commandos, ever had their own weapons manufacturing firm, but the gear was pretty sweet, nonetheless.

These season 1 videos remind me how much I hate ME1’s color coding. I mean, the next two games have their share of uninspired visuals, but just look at Feros! Everything is basically grey, and if it isn’t grey, it is some ugly smeared red that’s also sorta greyish. And it’s more or less the same on every other planet, with the exception of the corridor drive on virmire , and some of the random side-missions. Nothing in this game visually pops. It’s one of the prime reasons I can’t bring myself to replay ME1 anymore. That, and the kinda boring, grindy combat.
And the ages-long Eden Prime – Citadel turorial/intro section.
And the fact that the prolonged exposure to 2 & 3 have by now almost completely retroactively eroded my immersion for ME1.
Still, I’d rather slog through 1 again than having to endure the sequels…
Dammit, it’s early, and I’m grumpy.